


In Another World

by VerityXxX



Series: White Boots [10]
Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Med wins but that doesn't make everything better, Pyeonchang AU, PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics, also Alina is a bean, and eteri and co are shit but relatively irrelevant, indeed possibly worse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 11:34:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30071610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerityXxX/pseuds/VerityXxX
Summary: In another world Alina feel on the lutz loop. In another world Alina fell from first to third in the free. In another world Evgenia won and Alina came second yet everything wasn’t perfect.
Series: White Boots [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1023147
Kudos: 2





	In Another World

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this in my head for ages about an AU in which Alina doesn't win and kinda a character study on how that affects both her and Evgenia. It will probably stay as a one shot but I may do a couple more about different skating what ifs and imagine the consequences of those so if anyone has any in mind let me know.

In another world Alina feel on the lutz loop. In another world Alina fell from first to third in the free. In another world Evgenia won and Alina came second yet everything wasn’t perfect.

Evgenia is the winner everyone expected and wanted. No one denies her victory on talk shows and she is shown around gold medal around her neck proudly. Here she leads kick offs at the World Cup, rubs shoulders with the best in Russian society and covers magazines smiling brilliantly. 

She is brilliant and this is her time to shine –it won’t come again she won’t last till the next Olympics--so she does but she can’t outshine the medal around her neck. In this world she never sees how quickly the media changes from supporting her to Alina and how all her fans moved on. She still ends up jaded.

After the Olympics they are trotted out to Putin and he shakes her hand. His grip is strong and when he looks at her, she can feel the weight of her medals dragging her down. Sometimes the prettiest of chains are the heaviest and most binding and these chains are all the worse because they of her making. He’s bought her loyalty and silence—she’s not an idiot she sees the scoring and hears the deals made in dark corridors. Maybe she would have won without it but she knows people dispute it—criticize her jumps and her scoring if she faulters they are there to tear her down. They can’t afford another Adelina or Yulia so she has to be brilliant and be the star that they all expect the hero of Russia and only individual athlete to win gold in PyeongChang. She still hurls when she receives his letter in the post for her birthday. She had never realised all she was worth was a gold medal.

In this world no one goes to Orser. Evgenia can’t—what more can she want. Eteri tells her she’s selfish to want any more even though all she wants to do is to skate and for her back to stop hurting. But Eteri says that she has to protect her legacy and Eteri’s always been right. She promised her the gold medal and she got it for her. How could she ask for anything more from skating, her body and Eteri.

Alina’s not brave enough to go either. She’s only a child at the Olympics not even sixteen and how could she ask her parents to send her to Canada when she threw away her chance at the gold. 

She fell on that jump—Daniil tells her that without the fall she would’ve won. It doesn’t make her feel better. Instead she hates herself all the more. She was an idiot and threw away her Olympic gold medal forget that that information is too much pressure for a fifteen year old. She falls again at worlds and throws away that medal too and she doesn’t just loose the gold but the silver and bronze this time. Eteri blames her hurls vitriol at her says Zhenya wouldn’t have fallen. Of course, she wouldn’t Alina wants to snap that’s why she’s the Olympic Champion but she doesn’t she’s the good girl the dutiful students and second place. Eteri wouldn’t tolerate that from the Zhenya let alone Zagitova.

In this world, Alina isn’t given a dog instead she has to grow to protect herself unable to hide behind Masaru who will never leave Japan. She is forced to become tough and hard hiding everything within herself. She envies Zhenya when she watches her emotions spilling over the ice and the younger girls who are quick to laugh and even quicker to cry. She is stoic, controlled and she can’t show any weakness. After all she hasn’t got the medal to hide protect herself with now. She focuses on her skating until she feels like she is part of the ice focusing on the edges and the sound of her skates on the ice. She can control that. She’s learnt she can’t stop herself from falling if she could she would have willed herself to the medal, but she can control her base skating and her performance, and she won’t lose any points there. Besides Michelle Kwan neither won an Olympic gold either—though Alina isn’t foolish enough to imagine that a second Olympic silver medal could ever be in the cards for her.

She designs her own programs in the evenings once she goes home and then starts to feed the ideas through to Daniil subtly playing snippets of the music, leaving a brochure from a concert in the changing rooms and referencing a movie in which the music played a prominent role. Eventually he comes to her with the program that she wanted and after persuading him to change a music cut, she’s happy with the program and the process begins again. He’s easy to convince she realises—he doesn’t want to make her happy the way he did before the Olympics when it looked like she could win but he needs her as much as she needs him. Compared to Eteri and Dudakov he is a nobody—he’d only risen to prominence alongside her in the Olympic season and Zhenya was far too much Eteri’s creature to give him credit. 

But Alina the shy quiet girl with the ballet programs he’d choreographed and led artistically was the perfect vehicle to get his name out there as a coach. If Alina was still the naïve girl she’d been before the Olympics, this realisation would have saddened her—she had loved being Daniil’s favourite it had filled her with confidence when she’d skated knowing that he was out of the coaches was rooting for her above everyone else. But now it didn’t surprise her—everyone was using everybody and it’s not like she wasn’t using him right back.

She podiums at Worlds the next year and it’s a struggle but she’s smart and canny and she knows the Russian Federation needs her. Zhenya’s been forced into retirement and the other girls are too young—she won’t get this opportunity again, so she grasps it with two hands. She still comes second with Rika beating her but this time she didn’t fall. Instead Rika out-teched her landing two triple axels in the free and another in the short. She’s always been told she’ll win if she skates clean—she could’ve won the Olympics if she had after all but that’s not true anymore. The tables have turned and now she’s the one out-teched and outdated even if she’s only three months older then Rika but the she feels like she’s aged years since the Olympics. Besides it’s not just Rika, Alina can’t help but feel nervous thinking about the three girls left behind because they were too young. She knows she can’t compete with them and she doesn’t really want to. 

She still loves to skate and support herself and her family so she milks Russian Federation for all they are worth—she stays on the national team for years she’s mastered the art of placing sixth at nationals and qualifying a spot and scraping onto the Grand Prix via a generously scored challenger. Eteri despises her for her lack of ambition but Alina keeps her head down and studies--she starts university and uses her skating points to get herself into the best one she can and from there it’s easy. She knows how to work and the pain from a pencil is nothing compared to skating. In 2025 she makes Euros at the grand age of 22 after a series of fluke accidents and pneumonia take out four of the girls and she skates her program and snatches a bronze much to everyone’s surprise—it’s been seven years and she’s practically been forgotten a side note compared to the dominance of Evgenia and the quad revolution behind her. 

When they comment on her performance quality, she laughs maybe there’s some truth to the maturity argument because she can tell she doesn’t move the same way she used to when she was younger. She’s growing old and stiff and her transitions have been taken out so she can land the jumps—she won’t point that out to them though.

She quietly retired that year the money from the Euros medal forming the deposit on a shop she buys and quietly runs using her business degree. She gets recognised maybe twice and she smiles and takes the photo but in general she keeps her head down and lets her work stand for itself.

She sees Evgenia on the screen too much and sometimes she’s resentful remembering that gold medal which could have been hers wishes she had those opportunities but she can see how even Zhenya’s spark which had burnt so brightly as children has been squashed and made to fit into the package of the champion and she doesn’t mind her position as the anonymous almost champion.


End file.
